1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the art of silk screen printing and, more particularly, to a modular apparatus which can, by means of an ordinary hand truck, be readily moved from place to place, and quickly set up and operated. Such apparatus finds particular use at places such as county fairs, conventions, et cetera, as well as its being useful to the smaller organizations that have fundraisers in which T-shirts and other items are printed for sale.
2. Description of the Prior Art
There is a great body of prior art relating to the field of silk screen printing of varying complexity. At one end of the spectrum is the original silk screen concept in which simple silk screens were prepared for each individual color to be used in the silk screen process, hand-held during operation, and manually put in register from one print to the other. At the other end of the spectrum are the complex, fully automatic, silk screen printing machines such as those illustrated in Schwarzberger U.S. Pat. No. 2,846,946, Pierson U.S. Pat. No. 4,813,351, Pellegrina U.S. Pat. No. 5,136,938, and Herrmann U.S. Pat. No. 5,456,172. Of somewhat less complexity is the silk screen printing machine of Proffer U.S. Pat. No. 5,127,321. All of these silk screen printing machines provide excellent results, but are far too complex, massive, and expensive to be moved from place to place at will and, for all practical purposes, are only directed to the high volume printing market.
There have been a number of attempts to produce an intermediate, essentially manual silk screen printing machine. U.S. Pat. No. 4,671,174 to Tartaglia, et al, is a good example of such attempts. Even these machines, however, are somewhat complex and a bit too heavy and massive to permit their easy transportation. Further, such machines require repeated handling and registration of the silk screens, and a great deal of time and effort is consumed in trying to ensure that there is good registration from one screen to another. If registration of each screen is not carefully performed, an imprecise and unattractive printed product may result.